1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to computer hard drives, specifically to the setup and installation of replacement or additional computer hard drives, and the copying of existing operating systems, programs and data from one hard drive to another hard drive.
2. Description of Prior Art
Installing an additional or replacement hard drive into a personal computer is a complicated task, requiring an understanding of setting configuration jumpers, operation of partitioning and formatting software, installing operating system software, and copying large amounts of data and programs from one hard drive to another.
Skilled technicians are normally required to perform these tasks, and the entire operation can take up to several hours. Special knowledge of disk drives is required.
With the explosion in the sales of personal computers came the computer do-it-yourselfer, and large volume sales of computer accessories, peripherals and add-on devices including hard drives. Computer retail stores, mail order and even non-computer related discount stores carry large inventories of computer hard drives, and sell them directly to the consumer with little or no technical support. Most customers who then attempt to install these hard drives themselves either fail entirely or end up making many tech-support calls to the drive manufacturer before succeeding. Many who do finally succeed in physically installing the new drive end up losing part or all of their existing software installations and data from their old hard drive.
Drive manufacturers and other software manufacturers have tried to remedy this problem by writing software that makes it easier to perform the partitioning, formatting and data copying operations of the process. Drive manufacturers have also attempted to develop installation manuals that make setting configuration jumpers and making electrical connections easier for the customer. Although these methods have helped, it is still a lengthy process with little guarantee of complete success.
In addition, in the case of drives that use the Integrated Drive Electronics ("IDE") interface, one drive must be set up as a master drive and the other as a slave. Drives of different manufacture are often not compatible in this master/slave configuration. This prevents the possibility of copying the existing data from the original drive to the replacement drive directly. Tape backup or other means must be used to transfer data, and the average consumer does not often have the resources to do this. U.S. Pat. No. 5,777,811 issued Jul. 7, 1998 to Bodo provided a data duplicating system for copying digital data between information storage devices. This device was designed primarily for portability by using a small footprint. However this system was designed for use by computer technicians and computer manufacturers where drive cable configurations and drive jumper settings were understood in detail. This system copied the data from the first hard drive to the second hard drive exactly, thus did not permit the reorganization of the data for optimization, nor did it inspect any of the data for the presence of computer viruses or damaged data other than physical defects on the drive itself, nor did it accommodate drives with different partition sizes. Finally this system did not interact with the customer through an interactive multimedia interface nor did it present the customer with a printed report with instructions for the final steps of the installation.